One of my favorite products in the grocery store is One-Pie. It's a pumpkin pie filling left over from the golden age of easy-to-prepare canned foods, and its labeling looks like it hasn't been updated since the first can had the top sealed on.
It's a plain old white label with "One-Pie" written in old-fashioned easy-to-read lettering, with a picture of a slice of pie on the front. On the back is a pie recipe. You can't get any more straightforward than that!
Nearly every other product in the grocery store has a new look. The store itself has probably been renovated 10 times in as many years. Even the Campbell's Tomato Soup can wasn't sacred enough to avoid the tampering of product design "experts." You actually have to check the date on that One-Pie can to make sure it hasn't been sitting around since the Eisenhower administration.
Marketing strategists think that updating packaging is a smart way of attracting new consumers. For some products, however, it might alienate current consumers and disconnect them from the emotional attachment they have to a brand.
Tufts is rumored to be in the process of potentially "re-branding" itself so as to project a better image to the world. The rationale for the re-branding is that Tufts wants to position itself as an alternative to the stodgy, tradition-filled colleges and universities of New England with whom it feels it can never compete. As such, Tufts wants its own new brand to announce to the world that we are fresh and edgy. Not only is this a defeatist way of approaching a re-branding campaign, but the measures to be taken will banish tradition from this hill once and for all.
The first step in the re-branding: Ditch the font in which "TUFTS" is emblazoned on everything from letterheads to building signs. From now on, our school's name will be written partially in lowercase. Lowercase! How utterly ghastly! As if Tufts doesn't have enough of an inferiority complex, we have to align ourselves with a typeface that is scarcely more than a whisper? We want new students screaming, "I got into TUFTS!" when they open their acceptance letters. In lowercase, that exclamation becomes a lament: "I got into Tufts."
When AT&T made the uppercase/lowercase switch, I knew things were taking a turn for the worse at the former telecom giant. AT&T was once so huge that it got a single-letter ticker symbol on the stock market - that's like having a one-digit license plate in Massachusetts.
In 20 years it had gone from one of the world's largest corporations to a shell of its former self. By 2006, AT&T had already been bought out and gutted of staff and became at&t. As if to just announce its defeat, the company deemed its name unworthy of capitalization in the name of trying to look edgy. I've got news for you: The only time lowercase was ever edgy was when it was coming from the pen of e.e. cummings.
Perhaps the Omidyars have something to do with this. Their own company has a quite peculiar culture of capitalization which dooms copywriters to start sentences with lowercase letters every time they write about the online auction powerhouse. If the new logo, once revealed, shows our school's name to be "tUfts uNiversity," I'll know that the school's latest donation was sent via Bacow's PayPal account.
In addition to the sheer horror of lowercase, there's a break in tradition that comes with re-branding. Another one of the suggestions was downplaying the use of the school seal. Apparently, there's already controversy over the seal, as it was only adopted in the 1920s and therefore isn't considered sacred enough to be saved. (There is also a separate ornithological controversy, in that the bird-tail depicted belongs to a pigeon and not a dove, but that's for a different column.)
In my opinion, a seal is possibly one of the most important imaging opportunities a school has. It's instantly recognizable and communicates the core values of the institution. In the era before corporate-speak, a school seal was a mission statement.
I think Tufts needs to take a little advice from One-Pie: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. In a very small way, I feel that the sense of continuity imbued through that famous can connects me with something much greater than simply a decision over which pumpkin filling I want to buy. A good example of that connection is the very fact that I'm waxing sentimental about a canned pie filling just because it's had the same can graphics since the days when my great grandmother was making Thanksgiving dinner.
Its hard enough graduating and realizing that once you have left, Tufts will still have students, but you won't be among them. Someone else will be living in your old dorm or house. New buildings will change the look of the campus. The professors who stay around might not even remember you. In 30 years, the only connection you'll have to this Hill is the memories you made here.
That's why it's so important that Tufts hold onto whatever meager traditions it has. A lack of a seal and a new font might bring new attention to the school in the future, but it will also signify a disconnect from the past.
